Philosophy

“A mechanical fruit is no fruit at all. The anti-social and hyperviolent rapist in A Clockwork Orange is a despiccable human being, but still a real, live person. SPOILER ALERT: At the end of the movie he is broken down, his (evil) spirit killed, replaced by a well-behaved clockwork. The message is that clockwork predictability has no human value, even compared to diabolic freedom of action”

Be systematic, record all insights and important information
Use a commonplace system

Growth mindset, Deliberate Practice: Peak, mental models
Integrate the knowledge that we can change and grow, we’re not set from birth. It’s not you who are being judged, it’s your ability to pick yourself up that counts, not your innate nature

Use a coach or mentor
You can’t move outside the box without somebody guidning you from the outside, noticing what you can’t. You can never see your own blind spots

Ignore what other people think
Never mind criticism; who are they anyway?

Seek variation, novelty
Learn new things

Meditate
Know thyself, know your driving forces, motivations, purpose

Take care of your body at least as well as your mind
Sleep, food, exercise

Be quiet
Experience silence, boredom, let your mind wander

Socialize

Recent research shows people who socialize less die earlier on average

Reason

Use logic, not feelings — the latter are for experiencing, not creating

Mental models

Make mental tools to get to the next level, where you design ever more sophisticated models

Prioritize with Bubble sort

Compare two and two, not all at once when having trouble prioritizing

Intuition + verification = accountable Blink

Trust your intution to provide interesting starting points, but not for providing solutions

It’s a PROCESS

You’re never done, and be thankful for that

Debate religion, spirituality, the supernatural

Debate it, but don’t discard it out of hand. Debating impossibilities hones your logic and rhetoric

Disregard what you can’t change

Put it away and focus on what’s important

Break it down by the 5 why:s

Problems, obstacles and challenges usually consist of ridiculously easy steps, if you go deeply enough. Ask why five times.

Conclusion: in investing, you are the one throwing all the pitches at yourself. Any impossible financial curve ball coming your way was originated by you, no matter if it’s a Japanese Tsunami or a subprime meltdown. The core of the problem always lies with your own risk management.

Things affect other things, governed by mindless laws

Yes, things are connected, but not governed, not controlled or pre-ordained. I mean, if they were, by whom would that be, and more importantly why? What would be that force’s motivation and ultimate goal?

RANT BEGINS ON GOD’S LACK OF ACTIVITY

Who that is mighty enough to be worthy of the “God” title (presumably creator and governor of all matter and energy in all time and space, and everything outside the time and space we humans think we understand) would go through the trouble of spending time in the infinitesimally limited light cone that includes the fate of humans on little insignificant Earth on the outskirts of just one unremarkable galaxy out of hundreds of billions, if not trillions of galaxies in just the universe we humans can observe?

OK, if said being could circumvent the lightspeed limit, bend time and so on, maybe governing Earth might make sense. But then think about everything else to govern. Can a single “mind” do that, given the laws of the universe as we understand them? Sure, if nothing we have mapped out with the scientific method holds any water whatsoever… If we assume anything goes, then anything goes. But then again, what’s the matter of pure unscientific speculation about something we can’t measure, have never seen a single shred of evidence of, that apparently couldn’t care less about our existence, that for billions of years and billions of lightyears has been content with letting a few simple constants control everything without a single identifiable instance of interference?

RANT ENDS

OK, so nothing happens for a reason. However, you can take any situation and make the best of it, make it “yours” — as if it were meant for you.

For example, you didn’t miss the bus in order to meet that old friend. But you did miss the buss, and as a consequence you did meet that friend you otherwise wouldn’t have. It had a lot of other less tangible consequences too (all without governance or externally imposed purpose), but you get to choose which unexpected and “new” events to focus on — good or bad:

If you always focus on good outcomes and opportunities from chance; to you it’s as if everything has a purpose. In reality as we know it, however, and the one that God has never interfered with in any outside-the-system-way (laws of nature), you are the one deciding to experience purpose (and thus it’s you who create the purpose).

If you’re well prepared, skill-wise and psychologically, you can make use of unexpected and random events. But if you just think things are laid out for you with a plan in mind, you risk not making the most of them.

God – what’s the utility?

What is God? Here is one way to think about it that has been suggested to me:

Everything; as if humans were the neurons of a galactic-sized brain — we are God and God is us; just like our brain is us and we are our brains. Everything is everything, and that is God. In other words we are God, we are the decentralized hubs of the all-encompassing being that is God: We created all this from nothing, and our objective is to understand ourselves and become whole again.

Oh, baloney!

Sure, there was a big bang, everything came into being from nothing. All matter and energy stem from a single dimensionless point, where notions like space, time and matter aren’t even applicable. 14 billion years later humans appeared on Earth, and according to Einstein most of the Universe can’t reach or affect us and we can’t affect it. Even if everything has the same origin, almost nothing is causally connected anymore.

[Insert ad hoc reasoning about quantum entanglement, wormholes in space-time, the simulation hypothesis, and AI-sophons (3-body problem) here; to try to save the idea of a single, all powerful, God, that can and does take action with a purpose directed at humans who occupy one single planet of hundreds of billions in a galaxy that is one of hundreds of billions of galaxies — and that’s just in our visible universe. And then stop to see if you’re really adhering to the God you started out believing in (God is a data nerd? God is the Universe? God listens to our prayers through wormholes and entangled quantum particles?)]

Back to the one God – no equals, no parts

Let’s get back to some sort of external, system-outside God with a mind of its own, and the power to change the laws of nature.

What could such an idea be used for? Where is there room for such a super entity? In what form, energy or dimension can it exist; since our current day instruments can’t detect God?

Well, there is a huge amount of dark matter in the universe. Could that be considered “God”? It still sure doesn’t seem to do anything — not for billions of years, let alone the mere tens or hundreds of years humans would care about.

What criteria should we require for something to be considered the “God”?

That God started it all? That he started just this universe? Or does the God title require starting all the other universes too?

That God can and does work outside the laws of nature as we have mapped them?

Would it be enough if there were lightcone local, super powerful AIs or aliens, that don’t care to show themselves, since we are so far beneath them — either because we are boring, or they don’t want to scare us, confuse us, or disturb our evolutionary trajectory. My guess is they just wouldn’t care at all. Such beings would be busy trying to understand and control the fate of the universe.

It seems to me, the lightspeed speed limit, lightcones and all that, would make it very hard for any kind of within-laws entity to be interestingly and meaningfully powerful. Oh, and then there’s that thing again; that it at least hasn’t exercised such powers in any identifiable way for all of time.

If God is local, it’s not powerful enough to be the God, he’s just a community sheriff. If on the other hand God is all encompassing, he has no way of knowing or governing (not to mention reason to) — it would take tens of billions of years just to hear some prayers and at least as much additional time to do something about them.

What’s the meaning of all this?

I just want you to use the same type of reasoning, as I did above, in all aspects of life: relationships, work, investing, love. Is your view logically consistent? If you assume A, what does that say about B; are A and B compatible?

Try to see the whole picture; try to understand what can be known and what can’t; what matters and what doesn’t; and perhaps most important of all; what you can influence and what you can’t. If you ignore everything you can’t change and focus on the things you can, your daily life will become much more enjoyable.

—

When you see platitudes and clichés like “Everything happens for a reason” or “You only get challenges you can handle“, as if there were somebody orchestrating your life; call bullshit! Things just happen. And you just happened to be there.

The challenges you “get”, i.e., that happen to you, they can kill you too. They can damage you for life — irreparably. They aren’t tailor made in order to make you grow as a person.

However, that doesn’t mean you don’t owe it to yourself to rise up as best you can to all events; or to grab opportunities that come your way by chance. Just know that no supernatural being threw them at you with a purpose in mind, or fine tuned them perfectly to something they knew for sure you could handle.

In life that is. In investing it can be a bit different.

Conclusions: Investing implictions of the No God Hypothesis

Come to think of it, in particularly in investing, you are the one throwing all the pitches at yourself. Any impossible financial curve ball coming your way was originated by you, no matter if it’s a Japanese Tsunami or a subprime meltdown. The core of the problem always lies with your own risk management.

You shouldn’t give yourself tougher challenges (when it comes to investments) than you can handle. In that respect, you actually never do get challenges you can’t handle (unless you are stupid enough to wade neck-deep into cow dung by your own volition).

No, wait for the right opportunity. Size correctly. Never go all in. Do the math and take all the responsibility yourself for your actions. Adapt and improve your strategy over time, using your hits and misses wisely. Try to understand and strike preemptively at your human biases. Create systems of habits and checklists to check your emotions, and prevent easy mistakes. And most of all, stop both blaming and praising supernatural beings for what is ultimately your own doing.

God is dead! Long live God!

Please note I don’t have anything against being spiritual, mindful, and searching for context or meaning.

Believing in some kind of personal or consequential God is ill-informed and illogical, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be comforting to some.

God doesn’t hear your prayers, but you do.

In that respect you are your own God; by putting words to your thoughts, by making room for silent contemplation, for appreciation, for making plans, for preparing for future action; if done thoughtfully you are setting yourself up for reaching your goals. Football players praying to God to make them score and win against another team full of players doing the same are of course not really asking God to indulge their crass wishes. They are praying to themselves, reinforcing the idea that their training will be enough, visualizing the shot and goal. After the score they raise the index finger as if emphasizing “I am the one God, my prayer to myself was heard“.

You do the math

Just to be clear, the one single message of this post is that I am God you have to take full responsibility for your own actions, for your success, for your happiness, for your investment risk management.

Topic: A series of tweets regarding (artificial) consciousness and depression

Length: Tweetishly short

Find something you love and do it with focus and abandon

This website is about the joy of exploration and knowledge — sometimes for practical use (enabling increased personal comfort and expanding degrees of freedom), sometimes for the sheer pleasure of enhanced perspective. It’s all about making you resilient in your pursuit of happiness in a world of accelerating change and an increasing divide between human biological instincts and our artificial environment.

I am conscious. Without a doubt. I guess you are too. 1) based on our physical similarity 2) would be stupid of me to try to communicate if you weren’t. The atoms I eat turn into me and my consciousness. Are the atoms conscious or is it just their pattern arrangement in me that does it?

Is a chimp conscious? A worm? A tree? A stone? A self driving car? We don’t know. Presently we can’t know, since we don’t know what consciousness is or how to measure it. Like dark matter. We know it’s there and affecting our world, but not what it is or how to measure it.

If we cut off the oxygen to a brain it dies. We know since the biological processes stop, and pretty soon it rots and dissolves. But do we know it stops being conscious? Actually not. At least we don’t know when it stops being conscious or its subjective experience up until then.

It seems likely that consciousness is just a question of the pattern of matter. I can eat a dead piece of meat (a brain, e.g.) and turn it into my conscious brain/body.Using the same atoms it seems likely a certain class of patterns should give rise to consciousness in computers.

But how can we know if a computer is conscious? Presently we can’t. It’s possible we have billions of conscious machines around us but we don’t know how to find out.Maybe many of them are depressed as well,but we can’t find out that either,since we don’t know how to measure that.

Maybe if we make conscious machines that are super intelligent as well,they can provide proof and gauges of consciousness.If they succeed maybe they can explain and prove other mental processes as well, including depression. What if we learn there are trillions of depressed AIs?!

Related to questions of patterns of intelligence, artificial or biological, and depression, here is another thought: Poverty has nothing to do with a lack of atoms or energy on Earth, only with an intelligent arrangement. We could all be a million times better off, materially.

Autonomous machines (don’t really need to be that intelligent or conscious) could extract atoms to build and maintain solar energy parks and (autonomous) construction equipment that produce housing, food and toys. The only thing lacking for almost infinite abundance is software.